Patristic trinitarian theology has been seen as a symptom of the radical Hellization of the church. Barth recognized that the opposite is true: The formulations of the Trinity were designed to preserve the biblical confession that God is a personal Lord. He says, “it follows from the Trinitarian understanding of the God revealed in Scripture that this one God is to be understood not just as impersonal lordship, i.e., as power, but as the Lord, not just as absolute Spirit... Read more
In his discussion of penitential seasons, Doug Wilson also offers this argument: “what gospel is implicitly preached by the practice of drawing out the process of repentance and forgiveness? It is a false gospel. Now I am not saying that fellow Christians who observe their church year in this way are preaching a false gospel, but I am saying that lex orandi lex credendi—the law of prayer is the law of faith, and over time, this liturgical practice will speak... Read more
Saussure says that speakers know almost nothing about the history of the words they speak, and this means that “the linguist who wishes to understand a state must discard all knowledge of everything that produced it and ignore diachrony. He can enter the mind of speakers only by completely suppressing the past. The intervention of history can only falsify his judgment.” (more…) Read more
Brueggemann again. He writes as if power were necessarily oppressive, but with some qualifications he has a profound point: “The replacing of numbness with compassion, that is, the end of cynical indifference and the beginning of noticed pain, signals a social revolution . . . . The capacity of feel the hurt of the marginal people means an end to all social arrangements that nullified pain by a remarkable depth of numbness.” Jesus’ compassion embodies this opposition to the “dominant... Read more
In medieval iconography, John the Evangelist is depicted as an eagle, and this portrait expresses the opinion of the early church fathers, that John wrote a “spiritual” gospel which has a “loftier spiritual purpose” than the other gospels. John is the eagle because he soars “aloft to contemplate and proclaim sublime truths,” while the other gospel writers are land animals, preoccupied with the “more mundane aspects of Jesus’ ministry and person” (quotations from article by Barbara Pitkin on Calvin’s commentary... Read more
Doug Wilson recently preached a sermon arguing against the adoption of “penitential seasons” of Advent and Lent. He makes a number of arguments and his reservations are worth considering. Here I want to respond to one of his arguments (from his sermon notes, online at Christkirk.com):”if we were to adopt this practice, we would be in worse shape than our Old Covenant brethren, who had to afflict their souls only one day out of the year. Why would the time... Read more
Walter Brueggemann ( Prophetic Imagination ) cites Hannah Arendt’s claim that Jesus’ offer of forgiveness was his “most endangering action because if a society does not have an apparatus for forgiveness, then its members are fated to live forever with the consequences of any violation. Thus the refusal to forgive sin (or the management of the machinery of forgiveness) amounts to enormous social control. While the claims of Jesus may have been religiously staggering, its threat to the forms of... Read more
Malcolm Moore reports this morning in the London Telegraph on Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to the tomb of St. Francis, and Gorbachev’s public confession of Christian faith. Moore writes in part: “Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Communist leader of the Soviet Union, has acknowledged his Christian faith for the first time, paying a surprise visit to pray at the tomb of St Francis of Assisi. (more…) Read more
John Ciardi writes ( How Does A Poem Mean? ) about poets who delight in hiding away meanings, often etymological, in the words they use: “they do not insist that every reader respond to them; it is enough that such touches delight the writer and are ready to delight the reader who is able to respond to them.” On what grounds does Barr decide that the biblical writers did not take similar delight in hidden meanings? Why does he think... Read more
With papyrological evidence, there’s some grounds for saying that there’s considerable overlap between the vocabulary and syntax of NT Greek and “street Greek.” Barr, though, thinks the same about Hebrew: “In Israel at any rate much of the biblical language is unspecialized, for the religious structure is roughly coincident with the linguistic group and the nation as a whole.” The argument of the last clause is intriguing. One could put it this way: Because the whole nation was covenantally formed,... Read more
Leithart
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